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NLP Insights Hub Unlocks Dark Data, the Analytics Blind Spot You Never Knew You Had
Hywel Evans, Director, IQVIA NLP Insights Hub
Jan 19, 2021

What is your dark data strategy? If your organization is like most global companies, you don’t have one—and it is an oversight that may be costing you. Here, I will share why leveraging your organization’s dark, or unexamined, data will be essential to keep pace with competitors in the coming years and how the IQVIA NLP Insights Hub can illuminate this data to fuel richer, more valuable analysis and decision making.

The term “dark data” sounds almost sinister, but it is really just the blanket term for the untapped data across an organization. Consider that when digitization exploded, the massive amounts of data suddenly available to companies were overwhelming. Most organizations focused in on using only the most accessible and structured information to propel their business. Success at that time was measured as the ability to swiftly extract a useful parameter to glean insights. But what about the unstructured information collected alongside more structured data points? These might include inputs such as respondent information from market research, physician notes, web and digital content, Customer Relationship Management system free text fields, clinical research reports, publications and many more. Since they weren’t immediately useful or easy to access at the time, they were probably set aside and never examined. By some estimates, between 60 percent and 73 percent of enterprise data is unused for analytics. Is there value in this dark data? According to 77 percent of company leaders, it is a potential goldmine for customer insights that should be an organizational priority.

Going beyond what to get to the why

So if dark data is so valuable and leaders know it, why are the majority of companies not strategizing to tap into it? The answer is that they don’t have the right tools. To use dark data effectively, you need to be able to expose themes and topics across chaotic, inconsistent data, and that’s a cumbersome process if conducted manually. IQVIA’s NLP Insights Hub uses natural language processing (NLP) to simplify this process, helping businesses detect connections within complex data to unlock patterns or insights that would have otherwise been missed. The NLP Insights Hub can quickly process Word or other Office documents, PDF files, or other unstructured text formats to identify and categorize themes and trends across sources.

These insights can give organizations a significant boost in a pool of fierce competition by allowing them to move beyond the “what” is happening with customers, stakeholders and patients to understand the nuances that explain “why” behaviors, such as preference changes or market reactions, are occurring. For example, themes extracted from qualitative market research might reveal unresolved safety concerns that have already been addressed but poorly communicated.

The qualitative advantage

A big advantage of the NLP Insights Hub is that the data it captures is dynamic, so you can pull the right insights at the right time for your needs. The NLP Insights Hub uses NLP technology to re-categorize available data depending on the question, without needing the user to re-clean or tag. In this way, it acts as a torch to quickly illuminate the right dark data at the right time, allowing qualitative and quantitative insights to inform each other for rich, useful context. For example, using the NLP Insights Hub you can:

  • Glean qualitative insights on how other researchers have approached their study design
  • Uncover contextual data points related to study participants that add richness and perspective
  • Generate awareness of new and unexpected themes and factors that were not originally built into studies and look for complimentary external research to help validate new findings
  • Unlock insights into groups of respondents to help create the right target groups for engagement

Quantitative data is the cornerstone of modern business, but it will never tell the whole story. The NLP Insights Hub’s ability to unlock qualitative insights from dark data, illuminating not only what happened, but why, is a valuable competitive advantage. If you would like to learn more about the NLP Insights Hub, check out the fact sheet. Or, better yet, get in touch with us to schedule a demo and see the NLP Insights Hub in action. Our team would love the opportunity to show you what this tool can deliver for your business.

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